Resistance 3 highlights where the PS3 user experience goes wrong

Playing the sublime Resistance 3 for the first time proved to be a frustrating …

Resistance 3 is one of the best games of the year, and it has been highly anticipated. I know when I received my copy I did what gamers all over the world will do: hastened to play it! And that's when it stopped me dead in my tracks: the Resistance 3 setup feels like an unintentional guided tour of some of the failings of the PlayStation 3, both in terms of hardware and online user interface.

The first thing I was asked to do after putting the disc into the system was download a 600+ MB update. Depending on how unknown factors come together, this update could take just a few minutes or, in my case, nearly 60 minutes. (Sony's problems with its update servers are well known and, to our knowledge, there has yet to be a technical explanation for why something as simple as a local proxy can boost speeds dramatically.)

With my patch downloaded, I was now ready to install this game and get down to the very important business of killing Chimera. Instead I was informed that I didn't have enough free space on my 60GB system. The multiple (mandatory) installations for past games have caught up with me, and I couldn't help but feel somewhat frustrated—these were mostly games I wouldn't have installed anyway.

So I had no choice but to manage the space on my system. I deleted a few older games to make room, feeling a bit irritated that, were I to want to play one of them in the future, I would have to sit through the mandatory installations again. Understand that I don't have an issue with installing games by choice; I do find it frustrating and a point against Sony's PS3 experience, however, that a 60GB HDD is not sufficient for managing a library of game installs. It most certainly is on other platforms.

Warning: language not safe for work

In the not too distant past, there were great debates about console gaming and whether "DVD-9 was enough" or not. DVD-9 is, of course, the format used by Microsoft's Xbox 360 for games, a format designed to stuff 8.5GB data onto an ancient DVD. This looks paltry next to Blu-ray's 25GB capacity, but that advantage seems to have largely disappeared in the face of Sony's mandatory installations. It's nice not having to swap out, say, 2 or 3 DVDs during an install, but I'd much prefer no install at all.

At this point, it had been well over an hour of updates, installations, and loading screens before I finally got to play the game. I actually played another videogame on another system to pass the time. But hey, single player here I come! Sadly, I would soon learn that my travails were not complete.

Online is even better

"Last night, I quit playing Resistance 3 so I could download a firmware update so I could open the PlayStation Store so I could redeem an online pass so I could play Resistance 3," Jim Sterling wrote in a rage-choked rant on Game Front.

You can't just play Resistance 3 online just because you've installed the game! First you have exit the game, head to the PlayStation Store, and learn that you have to install a firmware update. Then, after it has applied, you get to return to the Store and input a one-time use code to unlock online play (take that, buyers of used games!).

"I'm just as bad as everybody else—still buying games for sixty dollars apiece, still putting online codes in like a good little puppet, no matter how damaging to the industry's long-term success I think they are," Sterling wrote. "I know online passes are bad. I know lengthy firmware updates are annoying. I know mandatory installations that can take over forty-five minutes are utterly inexcusable. Chances are good that you know as well. Yet we're still swallowing it."

Before I returned to PC gaming, console friends would tell me that I was in for a headache: driver updates, bad parts, patches to download, etc. But I could have hand-built a new gaming PC in the time it took Resistance 3 to patch and install itself to the point where it was playable.

It's probably not a big surprise to hear, then, that many game PR houses treat PS3 copies of multiplatform games like cooties.

Anyone who writes about games professionally has had a PR person apologize to them because there were "only PS3 copies" left to send to the press post-release. The major reason for this has been described above: game journos have a never-end queue of games to review, and losing time installing a game is a hard pill to swallow, especially when you're on a deadline. Of course, in the case of PS3-only titles like Resistance 3, it's not relevant, except to note how these install issues manifest themselves even in something as minor as game PR.

The issues that led to what could be a multi-hour wait to play a single game can be tied to the hardware, the software, the publisher, the developer, and everyone else involved with the design of the PlayStation 3 experience. When someone buys your game, they are giving you two of the most precious things they have: their money and their time. It's time for Sony to begin to take both things more seriously.